So I have 64 bit processors now, but it doesn't do me much good

Fahrvergnuugen

Fahrvergnuugen

I am the law!
I was really hoping that I would be able to get my experiment to work. I've written a program that stitches images together. I was trying to create an image that would be 70,200 * 70,200 pixels (123,201 200 pixel x 200 pixel photos of the earth's surface).

This was impossible on my G4 because I couldn't allocate more than 4GB of memory to any one process. Well, I have a G5 now and I still can't allocate more than 4GB of memory to any one process. I suppose thats because the system is 32bit.

(mind you, I didn't exactly expect this to work, but I was trying to be optomistic)

Is it the OS that limits this? Is there any way around it?
:confused:
 
It is not just the OS, it is the software. 32-bit software can only see 4 GB of memory. Even if/when Mac OS X because true 64-bit, the program is going to need to be rewritten/compiled as 64-bit to get the memory.

Besides, with the best G4 you could only get 2 GB of RAM. Now with your G5 you can have up to 8 GB which means that when a process uses 4 GB of memory it can be using real memory instead of virtual+real memory.

Off subject: how does your program deal with the spherical nature of the Earth?

Also, you could always get an SGI. An old Octane workstation can have up to 8 GB of memory installed and IRIX is a 64-bit OS. Just a thought, if this was something more than a hobby and you needed to actually be able to get it done.
 
I only had 1.2 GB of physical RAM in the G4 but it could allocate 4GB of memory to a process (virtual memory).

My G5 has 2.5 GB of RAM, but the process still bombs out at 4GB (obviously).

I did have an SGI but I didn't have a hard disk for it so I ended up selling it. My school just upgraded our SGI lab with a bunch of dells :rolleyes: maybe I can get my hands on one.


At the resolution I specified, I could only get PART of new york state. Its not a big enough area for the spherical shape to matter much. It does mess things up a bit, but not enough for it to matter.
 
Fahrvergnuugen said:
I did have an SGI but I didn't have a hard disk for it so I ended up selling it. My school just upgraded our SGI lab with a bunch of dells :rolleyes: maybe I can get my hands on one.
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If you didn't think you were going to install a ton of RAM, you could get away with an O2 (which has a maximum of 1 GB of physical memory) to keep the cost down.

I'm not sure I would characterize moving from SGIs to Dells as an upgrade though. :eek:
 
You have to recompile your program to 64 bit for it to work with more than 4GB of RAM.

The system has 64 bit extensions that allow you to work with more than 4GB of ram.
 
Captian, It's not actually a "program" its a PHP Script. So theoretically if I could get PHP to compile as 64 bit I would be all set?

racerx, they were indigo 2s, kinda old and slow.
 
Hmm, I'm not quite sure about that then. PHP runs inside Apache so it might work if you compiled PHP and Apache as 64 bit.
 
I'm not sure then how you would compile it as 64 bit. You could try downloading the source code and see if there's anything in the config script for it.
 
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